Derek Walcott is an identity-poet. Like Heaney, he writes out the identity politics inherent in creativity. He has been branded 'post-colonial' for this reason. Indeed, he grew up in St. Lucia, he writes in English, he has written in patois, and much of his work deals with his own ancestral and intellectual origins. Yet, Walcott's 'post-colonialism'--for such is the shorthand awning under which a variety of issues exist--is more complex than the sum of those parts would seem to suggest. In other words, the question presents itself, is Walcott post-colonial because of the circumstances of his birth--circumstances over which he had no control--or is he post-colonial because his poetry intentionally portrays an apparently conflicting view of himself as poet?
Walcott has always depicted himself as someone who participates very fully in the English language tradition, which is in part his cultural heritage, but who is also forever grappling with the non-English aspects of his identity. Rather than re-playing the conflicted poems of his very early career, time and again Walcott has come to the conclusion that any and all poetic traditions are every poets' heritage. In this sense, the internal conflict of 'A far Cry From Africa' is still present in later poems, but it is not the structurally shaping force it was in that early piece. Rather, it becomes a matter of theme.
Tiepolo's Hound is written in couplets. In a work that takes as its theme the issue of artistic identity and exile, the couplet form suggests a drive towards cohesion. What was conflict is translated into a dialectically shaping poetic force where polarities work toward the same goal--a work unified both structurally and thematically. This is the work of a mature poetic mind.
The book fictionalises the life story of Camille Pissaro. Herein, we perceive: Pissaro as provincial painter from St. Thomas aspiring to Paris, as alternatively ecstatic and homesick exile in Paris, as Sephardic Jew aspiring to a Christian tradition, as husband and father, and as vehicle for Walcott's narrative urge. As the poem advances we realise many things, but most significantly that the heart of this Pissaro's Paris is St. Thomas.
Walcott has used his own painterly impulse to map states of artistic consciousness through light, which he has transposed to an interpretation of Pissaro's painting. The constant illustrative use of light and shade in this long poem signify both the boundaries of Pissaro's frame of aesthetic reference, and the boundaries of Walcott's interpretation of Pissaro. Often, Walcott walks the line between interpretation and self-expression. To that end, the book's opening stanzas are definitively the poet's own--they represent his poetics of island life. Yet they also kindle the narrative into being:
They stroll on Sundays down Dronnigens Street,
Passing the bank and the small island shops
quiet as drawings, keeping from the heat
through Danish arches until the street stops
at the blue, gusting harbour, where like commas
in a shop ledger gulls tick the lined waves.
Sea-light on the cod barrels writes: St. Thomas,
the salt breeze brings the sound of mission slaves
chanting deliverance from all their sins
in tidal couplets of lament and answer. . .
Here, the 'sea-light' illuminates Walcott's page, and the lines of verse seem to write themselves, to name themselves 'Derek Walcott's St. Thomas'.
Then, in the sixth stanza, Walcott introduces the Pissaros:
. . .the horizon underlines their origins--
Pissaros from the ghetto of Braganza. . .
This St. Thomas, then, is at once an entity on its own, existing within the poet's mind, and a physical place comprised of exiles from other places, with other types of light. In this way, Pissaro's depicted longing is not for some idealised Paris, but for the place he feels hinted at, somehow hidden in the island's own light. Where St. Thomas is awash with 'sea-light', in Paris there is '[a] lengthening sorrow, a sinuous sigh of smoke. . .' Yet this sorrow is apparent in the book's first page, in the 'tidal couplets of lament and answer'. Walcott's St. Thomas contains the sorrow of Paris, and his Pissaro responds to something already present in his island. And this is the main point, it would seem, of Walcott's identity-poetry: the individual artist contains an individual map of identity, whether it be in terms of the artistic tradition or the origins of personality. Altogether, Walcott has consummated the project he set himself early on, with works like 'Crusoe's Journal', where:
...the intellect appraises
the objects surely, even the bare necessities
are turned to use,
like those plain iron tools he salvages
from shipwreck, hewing a prose
as raw wood to the adze;
out of such timbers
came our first book, our profane Genesis
whose Adam speaks that prose
which, blessing some sea-rock, startles itself
with poetry's surprise. . .
Reviewed by Amanda Jeremin Harris
